The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets

It’s great to see Windows 7 Beta finally released to the world! We're very proud of what has been accomplished over the last months; in many ways, it sets a new quality bar for a beta operating system release. Building on top of the Windows Vista foundation, Windows 7 adds a great deal of polish and refinement to both the user interface and the underlying architecture, while at the same time introducing many new features and improvements that support new hardware, give power users and casual users alike better tools to manage their digital lives, and enable new classes of application experience.

Over future blog entries, I’ll spend time drilling into some of those areas in more detail; of course, there are plenty of articles already out there that dissect Windows 7 in some depth, with the Windows SuperSite and Ars Technica providing notably comprehensive entries. I’d also like to draw particular attention to the series of Windows 7 interviews that Yochay Kiriaty has been posting on Channel 9, which give the inside scoop on the development of many of the most significant new features.

For now, though, I want to focus in on some of “secrets” of Windows 7: the many little tweaks and enhancements that we’ve made in this release that I’ve discovered and collated over the last few months of using Windows 7 across my home and work machines. These are the things that are too small to appear in any marketing document as “features”, but that you quickly miss when you switch to an older version of Windows. There are some who think that we’re arbitrarily hiding functionality to make Windows easy for casual users, but I’d argue that a great deal of effort has been put into this release to satisfy power users. In homage to those of us who enjoy discovering the nooks and crannies of a new operating system list, I’ve put together the longest blog post that I’ve ever written. If you’ve downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta recently, I think you’ll enjoy this list of my thirty favorite secrets. Have fun!

Windows Management.By now, you’ve probably seen that Windows 7 does a lot to make window management easier: you can “dock” a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge; similarly, you can drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width. What you might not know is that all these actions are also available with keyboard shortcuts:

This side-by-side docking feature is particularly invaluable on widescreen monitors – it makes the old Windows way of shift-clicking on two items in the taskbar and then using the context menu to arrange them feel really painful.

Display Projection.Had enough of messing around with weird and wonderful OEM display driver utilities to get your notebook display onto an external projector? In that case, you’ll be pleased to know that projection is really quick and simple with Windows 7. Just hit Win+P, and you’ll be rewarded by the following pop-up window: Use the arrow keys (or keep hitting Win+P) to switch to “clone”, “extend” or “external only” display settings. You can also access the application as displayswitch.exe.

If you want broader control over presentation settings, you can also press Win+X to open the Windows Mobility Center, which allows you to turn on a presentation “mode” that switches IM clients to do not disturb, disables screensavers, sets a neutral wallpaper etc. (Note that this feature is also available in Windows Vista.)

Cut Out The Clutter.Working on a document in a window and want to get rid of all the extraneous background noise? Simply hit Win+Home to minimize all the non-active background windows, keeping the window you’re using in its current position. When you’re ready, simply press Win+Home again to restore the background windows to their original locations.

Multi-Monitor Windows Management.The earlier tip on window management showed how you can dock windows within a monitor. One refinement of those shortcuts is that you can use Win+Shift+Left Arrow and Win+Shift+RightArrow to move windows from one monitor to another – keeping them in the same relative location to the monitor’s top-left origin.

Command Junkies Only.One of the most popular power toys in Windows XP was “Open Command Prompt Here”, which enabled you to use the graphical shell to browse around the file system and then use the context menu to open a command prompt at the current working directory. In Windows 7 (and in Windows Vista, incidentally – although not many folk knew about it), you can simply hold the Shift key down while selecting the context menu to get exactly the same effect. If the current working directory is a network location, it will automatically map a drive letter for you.

It’s a Global Village. If you’ve tried to change your desktop wallpaper, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a set of wallpapers there that match the locale you selected when you installed Windows. (If you picked US, you’ll see beautiful views of Crater Lake in Oregon, the Arches National Park, a beach in Hawai’i, etc.) In fact, there are several sets of themed wallpapers installed based on the language you choose, but the others are in a hidden directory. If you’re feeling in an international mood, simply browse to C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and you’ll see a series of pictures under the Wallpaper directory for each country. Just double-click on the theme file in the Theme directory to display a rotation through all the pictures for that country. (Note that some countries contain a generic set of placeholder art for now.)

The Black Box Recorder.Every developer wishes there was a way that an end-users could quickly and simply record a repro for the problem that they’re running into that is unique to their machine. Windows 7 comes to the rescue! Part of the in-built diagnostic tools that we use internally to send feedback on the product, the Problem Steps Recorder provides a simple screen capture tool that enables you to record a series of actions. Once you hit “record”, it tracks your mouse and keyboard and captures screenshots with any comments you choose to associate alongside them. Once you stop recording, it saves the whole thing to a ZIP file, containing an HTML-based “slide show” of the steps. It’s a really neat little tool and I can’t wait for it to become ubiquitous on every desktop! The program is called psr.exe; you can also search for it from Control Panel under “Record steps to reproduce a problem”.

The Font of All Knowledge. Long Zheng will be happy: we’ve got rid of the Add Fonts dialog that has served Windows faithfully for the last twenty years. (Of course, for most of that time, it’s been deprecated – the easy way to install a set of fonts has simply been to drag them into the Fonts folder via Control Panel.) But now font installation is really easy – we’ve added an “Install” button to the font viewer applet that takes care of the installation process: There are lots of other new features built into Windows 7 that will satisfy those of a typographic bent, incidentally – grouping multiple weights together, the ability to hide fonts based on regional settings, a new text rendering engine built into the DirectWrite API, and support in the Font common file dialog for more than the four “standard” weights. For example:

Gabriola.As well as the other typographic features mentioned above, Windows 7 includes Gabriola, an elaborate display type from the Tiro Typeworks foundry that takes advantage of OpenType Layout to provide a variety of stylistic sets, flourishes and ornamentation ligatures:

Who Stole My Browser? If you feel like Internet Explorer is taking a long time to load your page, it’s worth taking a look at the add-ons you have installed. One of the more helpful little additions in Internet Explorer 8 is instrumentation for add-on initialization, allowing you to quickly see whether you’re sitting around waiting for plug-ins to load. Just click Tools / Manage Add-ons, and then scroll right in the list view to see the load time. On my machine, I noticed that the Research add-on that Office 2007 installs was a particular culprit, and since I never use it, it was simple to disable it from the same dialog box.

Rearranging the Furniture.Unless you’ve seen it demonstrated, you may not know that the icons in the new taskbar aren’t fixed in-place. You can reorder them to suit your needs, whether they’re pinned shortcuts or running applications. What’s particularly nice is that once they’re reordered, you can start a new instance of any of the first five icons by pressing Win+1, Win+2, Win+3 etc. I love that I can quickly fire up a Notepad2 instance on my machine with a simple Win+5 keystroke, for instance.

What’s less well-known is that you can similarly drag the system tray icons around to rearrange their order, or move them in and out of the hidden icon list. It’s an easy way to customize your system to show the things you want, where you want them.

Installing from a USB Memory Stick.My wife has a Samsung NC10 netbook (very nice machine, by the way), and we wanted to install Windows 7 Beta on this machine to replace the pre-installed Windows XP environment. Like most netbook-class devices, this machine has no built-in media drive, and nor did I have an external USB DVD drive available to boot off. The solution: I took a spare 4GB USB 2.0 thumbdrive, reformatted it as FAT32, and simply copied the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO image to the memory stick using xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: was the DVD drive and f: was the removable drive location). Not only was it easy to boot and install from the thumbdrive, it was also blindingly fast: quicker than the corresponding DVD install on my desktop machine.

It’s also worth noting in passing that Windows 7 is far better suited to a netbook than any previous operating system: it has a much lighter hard drive and memory footprint than Windows Vista, while also being able to optimize for solid state drives (for example, it switches off disk defragmentation since random read access is as fast as sequential read access, and it handles file deletions differently to minimize wear on the solid state drive).

I Want My Quick Launch Toolbar Back!You might have noticed that the old faithful Quick Launch toolbar is not only disabled by default in Windows 7, it’s actually missing from the list of toolbars. As is probably obvious, the concept of having a set of pinned shortcut icons is now integrated directly into the new taskbar. Based on early user interface testing, we think that the vast majority of users out there (i.e. not the kind of folk who read this blog, with the exception of my mother) will be quite happy with the new model, but if you’re after the retro behavior, you’ll be pleased to know that the old shortcuts are all still there. To re-enable it, do the following:

Right-click the taskbar, choose Toolbars / New Toolbar

In the folder selection dialog, enter the following string and hit OK: %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

Turn off the “lock the taskbar” setting, and right-click on the divider. Make sure that “Show text” and “Show title” are disabled and the view is set to “small icons”.

Use the dividers to rearrange the toolbar ordering to choice, and then lock the taskbar again.

If it’s not obvious by the semi-tortuous steps above, it’s worth noting that this isn’t something we’re exactly desperate for folks to re-enable, but it’s there if you really need it for some reason. Incidentally, we’d love you to really try the new model first and give us feedback on why you felt the new taskbar didn’t suit your needs.

It’s a Drag.Much play has been made of the Jump Lists feature in Windows 7, allowing applications like Windows Live Messenger to offer an easy task-based entry point. Jump lists replace the default right-click context menu in the new taskbar; another way to access them (particularly useful if you’re running Windows 7 on a one-button MacBook) is by left-clicking and dragging up in a kind of “swooshing” motion. This was designed for touch-enabled devices like the beautiful HP TouchSmart all-in-one PC, where the same gesture applies.

Another place where you can “swoosh” (not an official Microsoft term) is the IE 8 address bar, where the downward drag gesture brings up an expanded list containing the browser history, favorites and similar entries. The slower you drag, the cooler the animation!

Standards Support. Every review of Windows 7 that I’ve seen has noted the revamped WordPad and Paint applets that add an Office-like ribbon to expose their functionality. Few, however, have noticed one small but hopefully appreciated feature: WordPad can now read and write both the Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML file format but also the OpenDocument specification that IBM and Sun have been advocating:

Windows Vista-Style Taskbar. I wasn’t initially a fan of the Windows 7 taskbar when it was first introduced in early Windows 7 builds, but as the design was refined in the run up to the beta, I was converted and now actively prefer the new look, particularly when I’ve got lots of windows open simultaneously. For those who really would prefer a look more reminiscent of Windows Vista, the good news is that it’s easy to customize the look of the taskbar to more closely mirror the old version: To achieve this look, right-click on the taskbar and choose the properties dialog. Select the “small icons” checkbox and under the “taskbar buttons” setting, choose “combine when taskbar is full”. It’s not pixel-perfect in accuracy, but it’s close from a functionality point of view.

Peeking at the Desktop. While we’re on the taskbar, it’s worth noting a few subtleties. You’ve probably seen the small rectangle in the bottom right hand corner: this is the feature we call “Aero Peek”, which enables you to see any gadgets or icons you’ve got on your desktop. I wanted to note that there’s a keyboard shortcut that does the same thing – just press Win+Space.

Running with Elevated Rights. Want to quickly launch a taskbar-docked application as an administrator? It’s easy – hold down Ctrl+Shift while you click on the icon, and you’ll immediately launch it with full administrative rights (assuming your account has the necessary permissions, of course!)

One More of the Same, Please.I’ve seen a few folk caught out by this one. If you’ve already got an application open on your desktop (for example, a command prompt window), and you want to open a second instance of the same application, you don’t have to go back to the start menu. You can simply hold down the Shift key while clicking on the taskbar icon, and it will open a new instance of the application rather than switching to the existing application. For a keyboard-free shortcut, you can middle-click with the third mouse button to do the same thing. (This trick assumes that your application supports multiple running instances, naturally.)

Specialized Windows Switching.Another feature that power users will love is the ability to do a kind of “Alt+Tab” switching across windows that belong to just one application. For example, if you’ve got five Outlook message windows open along with ten other windows, you can quickly tab through just the Outlook windows by holding down the Ctrl key while you repeatedly click on the single Outlook icon. This will toggle through each of the five Outlook windows in order, and is way faster than opening Alt+Tab and trying to figure out which of the tiny thumbnail images relates to the specific message you’re trying to find.

Walking Through the Taskbar.Another “secret” Windows shortcut: press Win+T to move the focus to the taskbar. Once you’re there, you can use the arrow keys to select a particular window or group and then hit Enter to launch or activate it. As ever, you can cancel out of this mode by hitting the Esc key. I don’t know for sure, but I presume this shortcut was introduced for those with accessibility needs. However, it’s equally valuable to power users – another good reason for all developers to care about ensuring their code is accessible.

The Widescreen Tip.Almost every display sold these days is widescreen, whether you’re buying a notebook computer or a monitor. While it might be great for watching DVDs, when you’re trying to get work done it can sometimes feel like you’re a little squeezed for vertical space.

As a result, the first thing I do when I set up any new computer is to dock the taskbar to the left hand side of the screen. I can understand why we don’t set this by default – can you imagine the complaints from enterprise IT departments who have to retrain all their staff – but there’s no reason why you as a power user should have to suffer from default settings introduced when the average screen resolution was 800x600.

In the past, Windows did an indifferent job of supporting “side dockers” like myself. Sure, you could move the taskbar, but it felt like an afterthought – the gradients would be wrong, the Start menu had a few idiosyncrasies, and you’d feel like something of a second-class citizen. The Windows 7 taskbar feels almost as if it was designed with vertical mode as the default – the icons work well on the side of the screen, shortcuts like the Win+T trick mentioned previously automatically switch from left/right arrows to up/down arrows, and so on. The net effect is that you wind up with a much better proportioned working space.

Try it – in particular, if you’ve got a netbook computer that has a 1024x600 display, you’ll immediately appreciate the extra space for browsing the Internet. For the first day you’ll feel a little out of sync, but then I guarantee you’ll become an enthusiastic convert!

Pin Your Favorite Folders.If you’re always working in the same four or five folders, you can quickly pin them with the Explorer icon on the taskbar. Hold the right-click button down and drag the folder to the taskbar, and it will be automatically pinned in the Explorer Jump List.

Starting Explorer from “My Computer”. If you spend more time manipulating files outside of the documents folders than inside, you might want to change the default starting directory for Windows Explorer so that it opens at the Computer node: To do this, navigate to Windows Explorer in the Start Menu (it’s in the Accessories folder). Then edit the properties and change the target to read: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /root,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}

If you want the change to affect the icon on the taskbar, you’ll need to unpin and repin it to the taskbar so that the new shortcut takes affect. It’s worth noting that Win+E will continue to display the documents library as the default view: I’ve not found a way to change this from the shell at this time.

ClearType Text Tuning and Display Color Calibration. If you want to tune up your display for image or text display, we have the tools included out of the box. It’s amazing what a difference this makes: by slightly darkening the color of the text and adjusting the gamma back a little, my laptop display looks much crisper than it did before. You’d adjust the brightness and contrast settings on that fancy 42” HDTV you’ve just bought: why wouldn’t you do the same for the computer displays that you stare at every day? Check out cttune.exe and dccw.exe respectively, or run the applets from Control Panel.

ISO Burning. Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: you can double-click on any DVD or CD .ISO image and you’ll see a helpful little applet that will enable you to burn the image to a blank disc. No more grappling for shareware utilities of questionable parentage!

Windows Movie Maker.Windows 7 doesn’t include a movie editing tool – it’s been moved to the Windows Live Essentials package, along with Photo Gallery, Mail and Messenger. Unfortunately, Windows Live Movie Maker is currently still in an early beta that is missing most of the old feature set (we’re reworking the application), and so you might be feeling a little bereft of options. It goes without saying that we intend to have a better solution by the time we ship Windows 7, but in the meantime the best solution for us early adopters is to use Windows Movie Maker 2.6 (which is essentially the same as the most recent update to the Windows XP version). It’s missing the full set of effects and transitions from the Windows Vista version, and doesn’t support HD editing, but it’s pretty functional for the typical usage scenario of home movie editing. Download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 from here: http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d6ba5972-328e-4df7-8f9d-068fc0f80cfc

Hiding the Windows Live Messenger Icon.Hopefully your first act after Windows 7 setup completed was to download and install the Windows Live Essentials suite of applications (if not, then you’re missing out on a significant part of the Windows experience). If you’re a heavy user of IM, you may love the way that Windows Live Messenger is front and central on the taskbar, where you can easily change status and quickly send an IM to someone: On the other hand, you may prefer to keep Windows Live Messenger in the system tray where it’s been for previous releases. If so, you can fool the application into the old style of behavior. To do this, close Windows Live Messenger, edit the shortcut properties and set the application to run in Windows Vista compatibility mode. Bingo!

Enjoy The Fish. I’m surprised that not many people seem to have caught the subtle joke with the Siamese fighting fish that is part of the default background, so I’ll do my part at keeping the secret hidden. Check out wikipedia for a clue.

When All Else Fails…There are always those times when you’re in a really bad spot – you can’t boot up properly, and what you really want is something you can quickly use to get at a command prompt so you can properly troubleshoot. Windows 7 now includes the ability to create a system repair disc, which is essentially a CD-bootable version of Windows that just includes the command prompt and a suite of system tools. Just type “system repair disc” in the Start Menu search box, and you’ll be led to the utility.

As most of you know the talk on the web over the last few days has been about Microsoft Windows 7 and it’s release into beta status. Those power users keen on having a look on what’s new have been frantically downloading it to get it installed. I now

What no Songsmith! I’m buying a Mac. Seriously though, can we haz the concept of sudo on Windows. Administrator should not be the default account for base installs, and it should ask me for my password before executing anything with Administrator permissions.

Thanks for this list! I’ve also installed Windows 7 on my Samsung NC 10 and – other than some difficulties with setting up wireless (had to switch it and the router to WPA2-Personal from WPA-Personal for some reason) – I have been pretty happy with it.

On the Quick Launch bar, I still use it and will probably continue to do so (now that I know how). Usually the first thing I do when I set up a computer for myself is move the Quick Launch bar to the right-hand side and leave the task bar on the bottom (though usually set to auto-hide). Vista made that harder to do, and Windows 7 even harder, but at least I have that option. I generally put all the apps I use on a regular basis on it (which is quite a few), and there just isn’t enough room with it on the task bar.

Great tips, already proving useful. I installed Windows 7 over the weekend and have been slowly reinstalling my applications, so far my experience has been very nice. (I’ve been blogging my progress reports).

I do have to agree with Marc Brooks though, when are you going to get native support for mounting an ISO file? With all the ISOs you distribute via MSDN/TechNet, I’d think it’d be a natural.

Sure, I understand the average consumer or business user doesn’t particularly need the functionality, but with the plethora of 3rd party ISO mounters out there it can’t be that hard to do, and seems like it’d be worth it even just for your internal use.

Heck you wouldn’t even have to integrate it into or ship it with the OS, just release a ISO mounter yourself, maybe one with basic functionality so 3rd party vendors could still add value.

i agree with ISO mounting, but i would also like to see a more accessible way to mount and work with VHD files too.

currently only an admin can mount and access a VHD and it can only be mounted via Disk Management.

it would be super cool if one could say right-click an ISO or a VHD and choose Mount from the shortcut menu. killer!

of course other utilities like Daemon Tools would still be best at supporting a wider range of images but at least for VHD, it would be nice if you could download an ISO and mount it to install as opposed to having to burn it to a physical disc.

likewise, mounting a VHD backup to grab that one document would be a time saver, since one wouldn’t have to switch user to mount and access the VHD just to get at that old presentation.

Thanks for the tips. I have used the Quick Launch bar for as long as I can remember, and am glad to see I can bring it back. I also like having certain apps minimize to the system tray. What I like about both of those is the ability to keeps things ordered. I keep common icons in Quick Launch, less common ones pinned to Start, and minimize some to system tray to keep the clutter out of the taskbar but still have those programs running (Mail, Outlook, Messenger, uTorrent, etc). I feel that by bringing everything out onto the taskbar, it makes for more clutter and less organization. Frankly, that is why I don’t like the Mac OS X Dock (though the W7 taskbar is far superior to the Dock if you ask me). Being able to move things around on the taskbar is nice, but it doesn’t solve the clutter problem without frequently reorganizing the taskbar. For me, that’s a step back from Vista. On option to automatically reorganize the taskbar as apps are opened and closed (open apps to the right, closed to the left) would be nice.

I’d like to third the request for ISO file support, both in terms of mounting and creating. I hate third-party tools since they’re almost always adware or buggy; some native support would be really nice, even if it’s a downloadable addon.

"It’s also worth noting in passing that Windows 7 is far better suited to a netbook than any previous operating system"

You seem to be forgetting the miriad of Linux distributions that are tailored specifically for netbook use.

Windows 7 is a great improvement for Windows, but many of the touted features have been standards in Linux desktops for several years. Free download, USB installation, docked windows, running with elevated rights… It’s good you’re catching up after falling behind with Vista, but the only added bonus I’m really seeing between Windows 7 and a Linux distribution is the Microsoft branding.

One additional comment to my previous one. It doesn’t surprise me that the new taskbar tests well, most people’s desktops and taskbars are a cluttered mess of icons and running programs. While the new taskbar is actually neater for these people, it is more of a mess for those of us UI neatness freaks. Please give us a choice and allow for even more customization of the UI by power users.

Brilliant list, even I learned some new stuff that will come in handy. And yes, I just moved my Taskbar to the left side of the screen and will give it a go for a week if I can handle it. When Windows 95 first came out so long ago, I almost wished I could find the person directly responsible for putting the Taskar at the BOTTOM of the screen and beat him or her to a pulp. I still can’t understand it… it’s basically the first thing I modify on a new installation, right to the top of the screen where it should be.

I was a side locker for a while, but I converted to a top-side auto-hide task bar. Why top? Top is where menu bars go. If I want to control explorer, I go to the top of the window. If I want to control my PC, I go to the top of my screen. I compliment that with Rocket Dock autohidden at the bottom of the screen.

But on the subject of screen real estate recovery, one feature I’d love to see in 7 is "minimize to preview". What you’ve done with the task bar is very nice, but it’s still a 1D list. Allow me to grab the title bar of a window and "swirl", minimize the window and pop a preview onto the cursor instead which can be moved like an icon, double clicked to restore the window or popped to the taskbar if it’s become clutter.

That’s it – after 26 hours with 7, all I have is that suggestion so far. It looks like 7 will be to Vista what XP was to CE 🙂

One hiccup – I changed my theme to Landscape. When I tried small icons for the task bar and then turn it off, the opacity strip didn’t regain it’s size. Now if I move the taskbar to the left, the opacity strip moves to the top of the screen rather than going vertical.

Only other niggle so far – have to run SharpKeys to get my apple keyboard’s alt/command the right way round 🙂

I’m not a fan of the removal of the quick launch feature. It creates additional work to launch new instances of programs, such as IE, and their position is not fixed on the tool bar. I use a double high task bar and pinned applications move all over. I also do not like having to find an IE window and right clicking to start a new IE window. This creates additional work and clicks to do something very simple.

After re-enabling the quick launch feature, I’m 1000x happier with the task bar and I like the new features it has. Just give us one click access to re-enabling the Quick Launch menu for those of us that like. I tried the new behavior for several days, and found myself cursing quite frequently.

I chose not to read any blogs postings for Win 7 until after I had run it withing VPC for a couple of days …. We’ve installed it upon a HP2133, and whilst it runs quite well it lacks the aero interface; and James O pointed out that you’d already covered a couple of my observations ….

Guess I’ll be installing it onto the NC10, and see whether it degrades or improves the battery life.

I like the new appearance of the taskbar, but I do want the QL bar back.

Middle-clicking on a program to open a new instance instead of the existing instance seems like a bad decision. While it is nice in that you’re basically using the only other button available on the mouse to provide that (perhaps important) action, I think you’ll find there are two issues.

1) People really don’t need to do it as often as you think – I can’t think of the last time I’ve wanted to do that on my mac, which follows a similar default model for the dock (clicking the icon switches to that app).

2) In every other multi-document interface (e.g. tabbed interfaces), middle-click tends to mean "close the tab". In fact, I get miffed whenever I use an app where middle-clicking on the tabs doesn’t work. Firefox, IE, Visual Studio, and I’m sure others also follow this paradigm, and I’ve now built the muscle memory that middle-click = close. I’m sure I’ll try it on Win7, too, and be /really/ disappointed that it does the /opposite/ of what I wanted.

Some great stuff here many thanks. I will say that even after a bit of use I am not a fan of new taskbar much prefer the old taskbar/quicklaunch combo. Trying to launch a second instance of a program (Visual Studio mainly) has to be done via the menu as clicking on an existing instance just uses that instance..

Actually, what I really want was an insanely useful feature that existed until XP – then went underground in Vista (you could still do it – but you had to wrestle with Vista to do it) – but seems finally completely gone now.

You used to be able to take a folder and smack it against the side of the desktop, turning it into a toolbar. What i would then do is remove the title, the icon labels and then switch to small icons.

Why?

You could stick shortcuts for lots of apps there and launch them in one click. You can also drag-drop a file onto the icon to open that document.

Here’s a jpg of my current desktop to show what I mean. (Yes, I also keep all my hard drives on the desktop – I tend to do everything in the desktop).

Overall I like the new taskbar. Not sure about having each tab in IE show up in its own preview though. If I minimize IE (with a bunch of tabs open, I often have a dozen or more) is there a quick way to restore it (with the last tab I was on still active) without having to remember which tab I was on and without having to use multiple clicks (i.e. on the IE icon and then on a specific tabs preview)?

I wish the Favorites in explorer could contain folders that can open and show links. In XP I could do it, but miss it in Vista and Win7. See my video on my skydrive… sorry about the audio: http://tinyurl.com/MyWin7Wish

On the topic of side-docked taskbars, i wish you could REVERSE the order of the taskbar. IE the start button is still in the bottom left corner, the tray is in the top left corner and programs on the taskbar stack upwards.

When will MS learn that 99% of what they added to DOS is totally useless. Please take away IE. Throw out all those stupid dinky user interface enhancements. Throw out System Repair and just do a simple Disk Image tool For the sake of sanity, get your act together MS.!!! Windows 7 is a load of overhyped garbage and should be trashed immediately.

Hi. It’s intersting, but what if i want the old Xp taskbar style ( could use the W7 theme wich look better ) and Programs and not Vista style ? I use Visat in Classica Style as I cannot use the Programs window for productivity reason. It’a extremelly annoing to search for programs in that small windows especially when you have a lot !

I have a question about Word 2007 – write protecting part of the document and being able to write protect part (but not all) of the header/footer. Can anyone help me? Please e-mail me at pixielou55@hotmail.com. Thanks!

"2) In every other multi-document interface (e.g. tabbed interfaces), middle-click tends to mean "close the tab". In fact, I get miffed whenever I use an app where middle-clicking on the tabs doesn’t work. Firefox, IE, Visual Studio, and I’m sure others also follow this paradigm, and I’ve now built the muscle memory that middle-click = close. I’m sure I’ll try it on Win7, too, and be /really/ disappointed that it does the /opposite/ of what I wanted." -noahric

Actually, middleclicking the buttons opens new instances like middleclicking links in a browser, and if you middleclick the taskbar thumbnail previews, it will close them ala tabs.

Congratulations! You’re that much closer to having the feature set of OS X. A few more releases like this and you might even be considered an honest-to-goodness operating system (ignoring security and stability issues, of course). Keep up the good work.

With all the focus, and some of it grosely misguided or misdirected especially when it comes to the RIAA, on piracy and and likes of that ill conceived brain child DRM….you want Microsoft to provide a method to mount .iso files natively?

I can see the news now…"Microsoft aids pirates by allowing virtual .iso mounting. Story at 10"

As much as i’d like that to be a feature also, unfortunately, we live in times where the misguided and misdirected, and often abusive and intrusive, "mis adventures" of the anti-piracy efforts are quickly painting operating systems into the proverbial ‘corner’.

I’m using the Win7 Beta on my Fujitsu P1610 (tablet) and have REALLY been enjoying it, specifically over the XP Tablet Edition that came installed on my machine. Win7 runs faster, better, and less power hungry. I’m also really enjoying the new tablet input updates, as well.

Thanks so much, btw, for #13 – I’m a heavy user of the QuickLaunch, and while I don’t mind the new layout, I’m really rather annoyed at the wasted space with the new layout, especially as compared to QuickLaunch. There’s too much empty space on either side of the icons, or else I’d just stick with that.

No matter, I’ve got my QuickLaunch back, so I’m once again a happy camper.

I really like the idea of a System Repair disk in Windows 7. For this purpose, so far, I’ve just been using a version of WinPE without any customizations. If I create a system repair disk using Windows 7 now, will that system repair disk expire when the beta expires, or does the system repair disk not follow those restrictions?

"Hopefully your first act after Windows 7 setup completed was to download and install the Windows Live Essentials suite of applications (if not, then you’re missing out on a significant part of the Windows experience)."

If people doesn’t know about it they won’t. I hope that you will added a feature inside Win7 as a link or something to a microsoft software store or something that shows all these free goodies that people can used either from MS, partners or other comps. A single place where people can go and get the software to complement their windows experience. Search, select, install done. Instead of doing search through google. Sort through results, find where to download, etc etc.

Mmm.. no – that probably won’t work on most netbooks. The NC10 might be smarter than most though. I just tried it with the Acer AspireOne netbook (currently the most popular) and ran into two problems.

First – will we EVER see a keyboard shortcut to create a new folder? like Windows-N or something? I’m always amazed this one never gets added.

Second – my GOD the Mac and Linux trolls are obnoxious. Are they THAT insecure about themselves that they have to actually go LOOKING for places in which to act sanctimonious in order to feel superiour?

Constructive criticism generally gets you farther than being a jerk, guys.

Yup, the trolls sure are out in force. I’ll stick to constructive criticism.

I second the concern about the lack of Windows Media Player taskbar miniplayer. The thumbnail doesn’t have a volume control and is not as convenient as the taskbar.

Another poster above said:"If I minimize IE (with a bunch of tabs open, I often have a dozen or more) is there a quick way to restore it (with the last tab I was on still active) without having to remember which tab I was on and without having to use multiple clicks (i.e. on the IE icon and then on a specific tabs preview)?"

I agree with that concern. I miss just clicking on the taskbar to toggle minimizing of an application.

I also find Explorer and WMP 12 rather drab in appearance. Vista has a much sharper and more striking appearance. Some of us actually like that stuff.

Giving users more choice increases the ability to please a wider group of people. Please consider that.

You are not at all limited to the C: through Z: mount points. You can take a drive and mount it at C:AnotherDrive if you want. Drives don’t need to have drive letters. It’s just that most people are familiar with the drive-letter-per-drive system, and so are most applications.

Great post, thank you, found a couple of very interesting things. Please keep posting updates, if you find new stuff. The only thing I find anoying right now about Seven is that there is no way to redefine Win+E shortcut, but I can live with it, even though I am not much of a My Documents + My pictures + My music and other things like that guy.

Other than that, I have to say, tried to install Vista Business, but it really slowed down my lappie, and photoshop CS3 was really annoying on it, Seven runs really smooth until now … I don’t know if I’m convincing myself of that because of the hype, but it really seems to me that it’s better than Vista; I am actually considering purchasing this one ( my Xp and Vista Business are OEM versions, came with the lappie). Hope they refine and tweak it even more, it’s really nice to have that much eye candy and performance in one package ( and I have to say, was considering switching to MacOS X when Microsoft announced that Windows XP updates will stop shipping in).

For the record, my lappie is a Dell Vostro 1500 non-custom, 2 gigs of ram, install went smooth, everything was detected (even the annoying card reader), and only had 1 minor problem with the wireless adapter, it got disabled by the Troubleshooter and I couldn’t re enable it, had to reboot, and … all the rest runs fine.

I’m another quicklaunch fan, just counted, I have 30 shortcuts in the quicklaunch popup and 3 more in the always visible part – this way I hardly ever use start menu, it realy should be a checkbox to restore this.

I want to add a vote to the ISO mounter too.

And somebody maybe could explain what’s the use of the ancient explorer "feature" of hiding known extensions – this is the first thing I disable on every new installation, it seems to me confusing and without any benefit.

I really wish it had built-in support for snapping windows to corners and screen edges. That is something I do all the time, and wish was built into Windows. What say you? Can this be added in to the beta? Pretty please?

Already the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_from_Windows_7 has got started. I always get the feeling that I’m at the mercy of Microsoft because they always remove *several* features from every version of all of their software products. Developers can get their way around by writing own solutions, poor end-users are left with nothing. Should I continue using Vista to publish and subscribe to calendars, view installed Winsock LSPs using WinDefender’s Software Explorer feature, or for using Meeting Space, playing InkBall or enjoying DreamScene? These are far more valuable to me than fancy eye-candish gestures and window management productivity boosters.

All I’ve been wanting from Windows for about the last decade is a taskbar on each monitor when using multiple monitors. Instead I have to keep using some 3rd party software for each version of Windows. This is a pretty fundamental request, is it not?

Does Microsoft just not care about the multi-monitor user? Are there not enough of us?

My biggest issue is I hope Windows7 FINALLY fixes the problem of other windows that want attention popping up over existing windows you’re working in. Vista went a long way, but that still happens occasionall, and I’ve still had some windows even steal focus when they did it. Other times, they just pop up, obscuring what I’m doing, but don’t get focus, and no amount of Ctrl-Tabbing or Alt-Tabbing will make it go away, as the window manager is obviously confused. I actually have to click on the window to activate it, and then minimize or dismiss it, or click BACK on the window I was working on to finally get it back in the foreground.

This is such a basic thing, I really hope some work has been done on this.

As noted, Win+Home is a shortcut key to minimize all the non-active background windows, but there is another way you can do this called Windows Shake. Just click and grab the top bar of the active program and shake the window back and forth a few times with your mouse and all the non-active windows will minimize. Shake the window again to bring them back.

I only ask… how different is this from Vista to justify tossing over many hundreds of dollars yet again? I am probably one of a few quite content with Vista x64. Runs flawlessly for my needs. At least this time they aren’t forcing an upgrade to obtain DX11 support (or as I hear).

I am not going to buy a new OS every 1-2 years at that price tag. Especially if the features and enhancements it brings are purely cosmetic/aesthetic in nature.

Just a thought on the usage of the taskbar on the side: It would be great if you could "flip" it so that the start menu and icons stack from the bottom up with the clock and tray up top. That way those with the muscle memory of clicking the start menu in the lower corner wouldn’t have to retrain so much.

I agree with others, like Chris Liphart above, that there should be a task-bar properties option to "flip" the bar. This not only has great value on the side-mounted bars (put the start button in the lower corner and have the icons stack upwards), but it also might have value for left-handed people or in RTL cultures, in a bottom or top-mounted task-bar, with the start-button on the right, with the icons ‘stacking’ right to left.

I know this isn’t addressed in Vista or Windows 7, but I hope it is addressed at some point in the future, perhaps a service pack. It’s something that frustrates and annoys me to no end.

In Windows Explorer, if you’re doing drag/drop of files from the right pane to a fold in the folder pane on the left… if you hover just a fraction of a second too long, the folder will spring open to show all the sub folders. Now, this is fine in most cases, but if there are a LOT of sub-folders, or if the folder that’s springing open is towards the bottom of the window… suddenly your drop target moves out from under you. If you release the mouse button, suddenly you’re copying/moving files to the WRONG FOLDER.

It should really be a basic tenant of good UI design that a drop-target isn’t going to spontaneously and unpredictably move on you just by hovering over it.

I’d love to see the controls fixed so that when the folder springs open, the parent folder of all the new sub-folders STAYS IN EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE, with the sub-folders extending off the bottom of the window if necessary (requiring you to scroll to see them if you really want to). This would eliminate the problem of drop-targets moving around in Windows Explorer, causing you to either try really hard to target the folder and release the mouse button before it springs open… or having to pre-open the folder and then position it, so you can drop files into it without any surprises.

I would love to see a "Quick Launch" icon in the taskbar, perhaps combined with the library icon. When you mouse over it you would see a preview window of all the program shortcuts you put there. The size would be the same as the shortcuts on your desktop (or adjustable for people who like to customize). This preview window would grow or shrink as you added/subtracted programs/shortcuts. I mentioned combining this with the library icon because when you mouse over it nothing happens. A click would open the library like it does now and mousing over it would open the quick launch window with any programs or files you want to put in it.

Bring back the ability to add and use the Quick Launch toolbar. This is an incredibly useful and takes up much less space and clutter on the taskbar than the new interface. Don’t just catter to the masses and forget about your power and business users. I have close to 60 quick launch icons of apps I use regularly and it is much easier to find and launch those apps then having to scroll through the start menu with vista and windows 7. Would be nice if there was an option to enable a fly-out of the programs folder like in XP and before.

Microsoft claims that you can run 7 with an 800mhz processor. Minimum recommended processor @ 1ghz with 1gig of ram. The only problem that I noticed between my machine that ran Vista Ultimate (2ghz AMD Single Core 32bit, 1gig DDR, ATI 512gig video card, 320 EIDE HD) was that Vista used all hardware drivers needed to make a purely stable machine, 7 did not. This little wonder called WARP 10 consistently MAXED OUT my processor at 100% when it called for ANY video rendering. Opening windows, animations, moving icons, always pegged and held the CPU at 100% until the system anticipated you were finished. I installed 32bit version on my single core 3ghz X64 machine with 4gig DDR (server), same problem. CPU at nearly 100%. WARP uses the CPU instead of the GPU for rendering. Be wary of this. When you install 7, and after the updates are on your machine (unless it is a dual core 3ghz or better) it will severely lag, dog out and suck bad bad bad. Otherwise the warmed over and updated (more compliant Vista) 7 was a joy to use. The new features were nice. Now all that Microsoft needs to do is to find a happy medium between the two, allow us power users more flexibility with the hardware settings and they MAY have a winner.

Thanks for providing very useful information. Great tips, already proving useful. I installed Windows 7 over the weekend and have been slowly reinstalling my applications, so far my experience has been very nice.

Fantastic selection of tips Tim, thank you. I feel really spoiled with the number and quality of interface enhancements, and am constantly suprised and delighted by them. I was worried the new taskbar would be an Apple dock clone, which I don’t get along with, but it remains a taskbar and the enhanced functionality is just awesome!

I liked Vista, after the drivers were sorted and the odd bug fixed, but "7" deals with residual irritations such as UAC and episodic sluggishness, takes the interface to a whole new level. This is by a big margin the best OS I have used.

Suggestions:

ISO mounter again

Win-E having an option to chage the default to something other than libraries

The only issue I’ve had with the new task bar that prompted me to create a quick launch toolbar was that I have a document that I frequently open. I’d like to have single click access to it. Quick launch provides that but the taskbar doesn’t.

as an old Xp user, I bought my Acer aspire 8920 that came with a pre-installed Vista Home version which I hated! totaly clustered with applications that would hardly ever get used. So when Win 7 beta was available, this was installed on to the 2nd partition for testing purposes. but I found it so stable and clean, that I will now install it as the Primary system on my acer one.

When you are working on the Movie Maker, PLEASE include all the save options for movies that there are in the 2.6 version. Pretty Please??? That is what made me go back to the 2.6 version in Vista as there wasn’t enough options for saving movies.

Now…. if you REALLY want to make use of the left-side toolbar (IMHO!), widen it to accommodate (recommended) 6 small toolbar icons, and set to autohide. In Taskbar Properties, set TaskbarButtons to Combine when taskbar is full, or Never Combine – anything to show the label of the task. Find and activate the Quick Launch toolbar as in tip 13 above, and load it up with your favourite apps. (Make sure Title is off, Text is off, and Small Icons is selected – I WISH you could to these all at once rather than requiring 3 right-clicks!)

Finally, search for, download, and install a great utility called TaskBarActivate, which allows you to delay when the hidden taskbar pops out if you brush the edge of the screen. So it stops unintentional brushes!

You’ll easily be able to access all your favourite apps with one click, and can see what windows in a convenient column and MUCH more clearly than when they are all strung across the bottom.

One more comment on the GREAT list: Re tip 24: I agree – there should be a way to change the default Win+E to show Computer. You can sort of do it by pinning a shortcut with "%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /root," in the target, then using Win+1 (if its the first pinned item) to start it.

Once I installed Beta Windows Seven. I just couldnt believe it so simple and great to work/play with just like the Windows XP. I just complete delete entire Vista which I dearly despite. So now offical I’m using Beta Windows Seven 32 and 64 Bit on my split partition. Once again I’m enjoying the computer all over again. I just hope it will have success in future,

I had already figured out how to bring back the quick launch bar but I can’t seem to drag it and dock to either side of the screen.

Pinning apps to the task bar is great but only for those that you use frequently, I commonly have over 20+ apps in the quick launch so it just wouldn’t make sense (or even physically fit) along with the task bar.

Being able to move it to the side is one of the only things that I have missed in Windows 7.

The only other thing is being able to select the classic Start Menu, I much prefer the cascading menu rather than the in-place navigation.

I’m a web/database programmer. I don’t want a bunch of pretty screen real estate hogging pop-ups, tip bars, info gizmos extra information and ways to search through the dozen windows I have open. If one is halfway competant, the tools available in many of the earlier Windows products already do that.

I don’t want to drill down through a half dozen directories to find "My" this and "My" that. I want to set up explorer to go directly to a director (not "My" folder) and show me a list of files with extensions and details. If file extensions were the default, it would put half the malware makers out of business. Instead we have all these people double clicking partial file names and hoping for the best.

Every version of Windows comes with more wasted screen space, more flashy distracting gizmos, and useless tools that help the intellectually challenged stumble around in magic mushroom land trying to find the latest file they lost and come up with something mind blowing to do with it.

If I wasn’t such an old fart I’d learn a new platform, but in the mean time, I’m encouraging all my IT students to start down another path if they actually want to create systems that help business and government store and manage data.

Vista is viewed by every results oriented developer and information worker I know as a bloated, time wasting pig. I was hoping MS would turn that around, but it looks like W7 is just a bug fix version of Vista.

Great list – I am always on the lookout for keyboard shortcuts, and lesser-known functionality. I keep forgetting how the win-x key for the mobility centre gives that presentation mode option on Vista and doing stuff the long way round.

What’s with the whining comments about how late this is for an ISO burner from MS? You can use cdburn or dvdburn from the command prompt with a free utility from the Windows 2003 (yes, more than five years ago) resource kit. Works fine on XP and Vista (and 2003 of course). So they only just put a GUI on it. Big deal. If you know what an ISO is and why you might want to burn one, I hope you can use a command line.

Now – mounting, I agree, is overdue.

Anyone not quite ready for the upgrade who wants the window-docking functionality should check out GridMove (originally suggested on donation coder here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=3824 ). I use this withe several custom grids for checking web designs in different resolutions, as well as docking windows around my 24" widescreen.

I used your suggestion to make the windows explorer start with the computer drives. But now when I click on a drive to access the folders, it opens in a new window. I have the folder options set to open in same windows. Is there a way to stop this that you can share? Thanks in advance…

I’m so happy with the beta. Running Windows 7 ‘in anger’ at home and at work now and aside from client support, Windows Vista Service Pack 2, is going to be a complete non event for me. Please, MS, get ‘7 out in 2009!

Oh – and Kanten’s idea to have Sticky Notes become a desktop gadget so we we can peek at them using Win+SPACE is brilliant.

Its nice to know this stuff. I have to say Windows 7 seems very mature for a beta, may be incorrect as I am a first time beta tester for operating systems. These little features as mentioned are growing on me. I currently dual boot between Windows 7 and Vista but I find myself using 7 more and more. Most of the things listed were features I didn’t even know existed.

The one problem I have is with tip #24. I’m sure it works great with vanilla 7 installation, but since I’ve installed Live Mesh the shortcut of Windows Explorer I get in the taskbar leads to Live Mesh Folders and has the Live Mesh folder icon. It does that now even if I change the shortcut back to just explorer.exe. Any tip on how to resolve this?

P.S. regarding tip #22. Wouldn’t it be nice if taskbar supported the mouse scroll wheel, so that if I had many windows open I wouldn’t have to go to the right of the taskbar and scroll down if I wanted to change the window with just the mouse. How does that have anything to do with tip #22? Well, in vertical mode, one would not scroll left/right as it is now, but icons would just continue down one by one. Though it’s probably late this far into development cycle that would make the new taskbar just perfect.

I didn’t know dissenting opinions would be disallowed, or maybe you didn’t get my last message… So let me try to be a little more constructive.

Perhaps the magicians at Microsoft could see their way clear to putting in a "developers" wizard. This would cater to experienced users who know what they are doing, where they are going, where they keep their files, how to access their favorite utilities and are only interested in getting to their work and getting it done as quickly as possible, using the fewest keystrokes possible and accomplishing their goals without the need for constant entertainment.

For myself, the delayed response in hovering over icons in the taskbar can be annoying when I’m trying to get work done quickly. With a little registry tweak you can speed it up and get things done quicker.

Press WinKey + R to bring up the run command, type regedit, and press enter.

Why doesn’t 7 remember the size & position of individual folder windows? It always uses the size & position of the last explorer window open (even if it’s a completley different folder). VERY ANNOYING.

Agile/ALT.NET Scott Ambler on Criteria for a Disciplined Agile Team Scott Bellware – Good Design is Easily Learned Mike Cohn on Establishing a Common Baseline for Story Points Hanselminutes Podcast 146 – Test Driven Development is Design – The Last Word

Lovin’ the Taskbar on the left side of my screen. One problem that I’d like to see addressed, though: pressing the start button should spawn the Start Menu BESIDE the button, not under it, where it blocks the taskbar buttons.

On the quick launch question in 13 – the new model works fine for me. I generally run about 4-5 items on my quick launch toolbar.

My boss puts every app he ever uses on quick launch – two rows of about 10 icons each. For him, I’m pretty sure the new model is not going to work. I’m glad you posted the workaround so he doesn’t go into withdrawal.

Finnally a Windows versions that will kick mac osx’ ass. lol Mac can never beat windows and this is a fresh example how the mac mania will come to end with the begining of win 7. i hav tried all windows editions, linux and mac osx too. but windows comes always on top dispite a few little problems. ppl like mac because they dont hav to support a zillion hardware. they are closed to limited software as well as hardware. whereas windows has covered a lot of hardware as well as software. mac os x is just pretty looking thing with limited funtionality. for example you just cant cut and paste huge files on the same drive, you have to copy, that means lots of space wasted if ur on low space. and if u hav to burn 4 gb file god it hopelessly take forever. ppl dont know faults of mac n go on praising it. dont blame windows its the best thing in the world n no wonder its the prefered os in the world . the statistics shows n i think win 7 will bring those macoholics to their senses

Thanks for the "vista compatibility mode" tip about Messenger. One problem: although it’s still in the Startup section of the registry, and "run at startup" is selected in the options pane, I have to start it manually. Any fix for this?

I’m one of the user who fanatically looked for lost quick bar after installing Windows 7. I used it all the time for one click access to 90% of the programs I use. I would typically have about 25 icons in my quick bar.

Few problems with Win7 (and somewhat serious):

1. Anything in Quick bar should be moved to new task bar’s pinned program at the time of upgrade from Vista.

2. As I’ve 25+ pinned programs, the big icons don’t work. The scroll bar that appears when task bar gets full is ugly, inelegant and non-productive. There should be some short of quick auto-scroll. If switch to small icons then those icons don’t use full space (there is "huge" black rectangle around them). In other words, small icons are too small and don’t efficiently use space.

3. Many of my apps (Outlook, IE, Word etc) almost always have multiple windows open. This means to get to an open window now it almost always requires two clicks (one to click on task bar icon and other to click on thumbnail). This is bad design.

I don’t think I would like new task bar design until these problems gets solved.

Hi, the only thing I don’t like about windows7 is that we, the users, cannot view the source code and modify it and learn how it works like we can with Ubuntu and gnome and other Linux distros. Microsoft should make their software open source free software just like Ubuntu with the gnome desktop.

&lt;p&gt;With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in the release candidate stage and getting close to general availability, it’s a good time to determine the potential benefit these two new operating …